Diane Benedict News

The Long Beach Playhouse opens its 2018 Studio Season with Lynn Nottage's play entitled Crumbs from the Table of Joy. The play has been described as a cross between Tennessee Williams' A Glass Menagerie and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin the Sun.

The Verdeen family is at it again. LAST ROUND UP OF THE GUACAMOLE QUEENS, presented by Boise Little Theater and directed by Wendy Koeppl is fantastically ridiculous!

Long Beach Playhouse audiences are in for a very original and unique treat because opening this weekend in the Studio Theatre is a production called Chekov Shorts: The Proposal and The Bear. Diane Benedict is not only the director for the show but has translated these two one act plays from Russian to English. Interestingly, she has interspersed in the middle of these two pieces an adaptation (again her translation) of one of Chekov's short stories, The Bet that she turned into another one act play. She chose these three pieces because of the vaudevillian nature of the stories. We tend to associate Chekov with his more serious plays like-The Three Sisters, The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard, etc., but he wrote wonderful, rich comedies that are exemplified in this production. Setting for The Bear is in the Ural Mountains on November 14, 1880. The Proposal is set near Moscow on November 13, 1885, and The Bet, set in St. Petersburg, spans the years from 1870 to 1885.